A journalist's trick for talking to people you can't stand | Joshua Johnson

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Journalist and radio host, Joshua Johnson has conducted hundreds of interviews, so he has learned quite a bit about how to talk to all kinds of people. Today, he has a piece of advice that might sound completely backwards for dealing with the people whose politics or values you might not agree with.

**Joshua Johnson** (0:29)
When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity, and maybe even connect. And it sounds insane.
Move closer, not to embrace them, but to explore them like a doctor studying a sample. You need a microscope, not a telescope.

**Elise Hu** (0:48)
In this talk, Joshua makes the case for closing the distance with the people you can't stand. Not to agree with them, but to understand how they came to believe what they believe.
Like many journalists, myself included, Joshua has spent more than 20 years moderating tough conversations. He hosted the national talk show 1A on NPR, and he's trained in the art of neutrality. Johnson talks about how we're taught to park our opinions, flatten our emotions, and just get through the interview without rolling our eyes. For him, this worked for a long time until he realized the distance it created was quietly costing something.

**Joshua Johnson** (1:26)
My neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs, but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them.
What if I had asked better questions? Like, who influenced you the most in forming these views? Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments.

**Elise Hu** (1:47)
Joshua makes the case for flipping the script on the old journalist principle. He draws a sharp line between neutrality, which he says is really just pretending you have no opinions, and something he finds far more useful and far more vulnerable at a time when polarization is on the rise. It's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Joshua Johnson** (2:21)
Idiots are everywhere.
Some people drive you right up the wall with their opinions, their attitudes, their politics. I dealt with all kinds of people in my 20-plus years as a broadcast journalist. Eventually, I found moderating tough conversations with whatever kind of difficult people you just thought of kind of simple to do. Not easy, but simple. The trick is to go somewhere I know you'd rather not be.
Closer. Distance makes things worse. I came up in public radio, trained by old school journalists who taught me the art of neutrality. You neutralize your opinions, deaden your emotions, and you can get through most conversations without rolling your eyes. Generally it worked, and it built me a strong reputation for fairness. But when the subject matter felt personal, neutrality felt phony. I used to host a national talk show on NPR called 1A, and in one of our early programs, I interviewed a descendant of Confederate soldiers. He argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved. Now, as a black man, I felt enormous pressure to remain neutral, so I decided I was just going to focus on his arguments instead of on him. His logic felt kind of flimsy, and I called him on it. And eventually, he just folded, and he said, It really doesn't matter what I say. And the moment he said that, I knew I had failed. I may have had a point, but I missed a huge opportunity to really do my job. See, my neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs, but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them.
What if I had asked better questions? Like, who influenced you the most in forming these views? Or, suppose we let all of these monuments and statues stand, just as they are. What would that mean to you? Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments. Grilling him changed nothing. It felt pointless. When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity, and maybe even connect. And it sounds insane.
Move closer. Not to embrace them, but to explore them, like a doctor studying a sample. You need a microscope, not a telescope. Doctors actually helped me learn this way before I became a journalist. As a teenager, I was part of a summer program for future doctors. Clearly, it worked. And I found myself working with clinicians studying cancer and thrombosis and HIV, very serious conditions. I kind of naively expected them to be these crusading scientists, but they were just level-headed people doing their jobs. But there was a lesson in that level-headedness. See, I am not neutral about the cancers in our world. Bigotry, hoaxes, political violence, I want them gone. However, as a journalist, I often had to deal with them in my clinic on the air. I survived it by getting as close to those problems as I could, and studying them like samples in a petri dish. In other words, I had to shift from neutrality to objectivity. And no, they're not the same. Objectivity is just when you park your emotions and learn without judgment. I don't have to like it, I'm just here to learn from it. Neutrality negates your opinions, as if you have no judgments. Does anyone here honestly believe I have no opinions on race?